Overview

Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography's power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or ""snapshots,"" highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking. Contributors. Michael A. Chaney, Cheryl Finley, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ginger Hill, Leigh Raiford, Augusta Rohrbach, Ray Sapirstein, Suzanne N. Schneider, Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Wexler, Maurice O. Wallace

Full Product Details

Author:   Maurice O. Wallace ,  Shawn Michelle Smith
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.30cm , Height: 3.30cm , Length: 23.60cm
Weight:   0.794kg
ISBN:  

9780822350675

ISBN 10:   082235067
Pages:   277
Publication Date:   19 June 2012
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Pictures and Progress / Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith 1 1. ""A More Perfect Likeness"": Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation / Laura Wexler 18 2. ""Rightly Viewed"": Theorizations of the Self in Frederick Douglass's Lecture on Pictures / Ginger Hill 41 3. Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White / Augusta Rohrbach 83 Snapshot 1. Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington / Shawn Michelle Smith 101 4. Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent / Michael Chaney 109 5. Who's Your Mama?: ""White"" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom / P. Gabrielle Foreman 132 6. Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity / Ray Sapirstein 167 Snapshot 2. Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew / Shawn Michelle Smith 204 7. Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other ""Perfidious Influences"" / Suzanne Schneider 211 8. Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures / Maurice O. Wallace 244 Snapshot 3. Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou / Shawn Michelle Smith 267 9. ""Looking at One's Self through the Eyes of Others"": W. E. B. Du Bois's Photographs for the Paris Exposition of 1900 / Shawn Michelle Smith 274 10. Ida B. Wells and the Shadow Archive / Leigh Raiford 299 Snapshot 4. The Photographer's Touch: J. P. Ball / Shawn Michelle Smith 321 11. No More Auction Block for Me! / Cheryl Finley 329 Bibliography 349 Contributors 369 Index 373

Reviews

Pictures and Progress offers a new understanding of visual representations of black Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through its compelling essays, this work reframes the archive of images of death, beauty, and suffering of black subjects in photography. --Deborah Willis, New York University

Author Information

Maurice O. Wallace is Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775–1995, also published by Duke University Press. Shawn Michelle Smith is Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture, also published by Duke University Press, and American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture. Smith is coauthor (with Dora Apel) of Lynching Photographs.

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